Atypical Mismatch Negativity in Response to Emotional Voices in People with Autism Spectrum Conditions

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are characterized by heterogeneous impairments of social reciprocity and sensory processing. Voices, similar to faces, convey socially relevant information. Whether voice processing is selectively impaired remains undetermined. This study involved recording mismatch negativity (MMN) while presenting emotionally spoken syllables dada and acoustically matched nonvocal sounds to 20 subjects with ASC and 20 healthy matched controls. The people with ASC exhibited no MMN response to emotional syllables and reduced MMN to nonvocal sounds, indicating general impairments of affective voice and acoustic discrimination. Weaker angry MMN amplitudes were associated with more autistic traits. Receiver operator characteristic analysis revealed that angry MMN amplitudes yielded a value of 0.88 (p<.001). The results suggest that people with ASC may process emotional voices in an atypical fashion already at the automatic stage. This processing abnormality can facilitate diagnosing ASC and enable social deficits in people with ASC to be predicted.

Mismatch negativity (MMN) stands at the crossroads between explicit and implicit emotional processing

“…Using a similar paradigm in individuals with autistic traits, a previous study reported that the amplitude of fearful MMN was negatively correlated with the severity of social deficits [Fan and Cheng, 2014]. Using a similar paradigm in individuals with autistic traits, a previous study reported that the amplitude of fearful MMN was negatively correlated with the severity of social deficits [Fan and Cheng, 2014].…”

Testosterone modulates preattentive sensory processing and involuntary attention switches to emotional voices

“…The stimulus materials consisted of two categories: emotional syllables and acoustically matched nonvocal sounds. Fearfully, happily, and neutrally spoken syllables dada were selected as the stimuli (please refer to Cheng et al 2012;Fan and Cheng 2014;Fan et al 2013;Hung et al 2013;Hung and Cheng 2014 for validation). To create a set of control stimuli that retain acoustical correspondence, i.e., the temporal and spectral features of emotional syllables, we synthesized nonvocal sounds with Praat (Boersma 2001) and MATLAB (MathWorks).…”

“…MMN and P3a in response to emotional syllables have recently indicated the emotional salience of voice perception at the preattentive level (Chen et al 2014;Cheng et al 2012;Fan et al 2013). Similarly, youths with autism spectrum conditions and conduct disorder symptoms exhibited altered MMN and P3a in response to emotional syllables (Fan and Cheng 2014;Hung et al 2013). In a previous study, female participants displayed stronger fearful MMN than males did (Hung and Cheng 2014), inferring the sex hormone-mediated processing of emotional voices.…”

Behavioral, perceptual, and neural alterations in sensory and multisensory function in autism spectrum disorder

“…In this study, children with ASD showed a reduced face-identity aftereffect, indicating that they were less affected by previous sensory experience. Additional evidence for this reduced impact of past sensory experience can be found in studies of mismatch negativity (MMN), where the enhanced response to the deviant stimulus in an oddball paradigm is absent or weaker in children with ASD, and has been observed with tone bursts (Abdeltawwab and Baz, 2015), emotional voices (Fan and Cheng, 2014), and words and pseudowords (Ludlow et al, 2014). In an MEG study of resting state activity in individuals with ASD and TD, analysis of the active information storage (AIS), defined as mutual information in successive time points in a signal, found reduced AIS in the hippocampus in individuals with ASD compared with TD (Gomez et al, 2014), indicating that neural information was less predictable in individuals with ASD.…”